City on Fire (123 page)

“Larry, how can I trust you?” There follows a long period of looking at each other. Still, he can’t quite read her face. Because this, too, takes work; when did he forget? Then she reaches up for the sleeve of his sportcoat. “I can’t believe you’re still wearing this, with this heat,” she says. “You know you lost a button.”

He wants her to keep on holding his arm, but it’s too late to say anything. He limps back to the window, pulls his shield from his pocket. The sun seems hungry for it. How you identify yourself: with flashing metal. He pulls up the screen and side-arms the badge with an ease that surprises him. It arcs up, flapping its leather cover like a busted wing until he loses it for a minute in the light, and then it plops, perfect sound, in the shallows of the pool. “Hey!” a girl’s voice says out there. “That was almost my head!”

She is under a flowering catalpa; the most he can see through the scrim of green is the shimmer of a Rangers jersey. “Old man?” she calls. “That you? Is it time for my entrance?”

He turns to look at Sherri. “Honey, you remember how you talked about needing projects to fill the time, if we were going to move upstate? I’ve got someone I think you should meet.”

ANOTHER COAST—THREE WEEKS LATER

HE’D ALWAYS FOUND AIRPORTS SOOTHING SOMEHOW. The in-between-ness. So many bodies, superficially distinct, rushing along the terminals. After his previous misstep, during a decade of semi-exile, he’d spent months in these places, almost as much time as he’d spent in the air. ATL. TGU. MIA. Remarkable, even at the dreaded Paris-Orly, to feel oneself precipitate out of ten thousand other people, merely by refusing the rush. And, wasted time being the handmaid of pointless hurry, he would use this suspension not to loaf, but to prepare for his return. His features were unmemorable. Lenses diluted his eyes. A hat hid his blank head. His luggage was plain and functional as only luggage can be and did not bear his name. He might sit at a gate not his own and assume the affect of a salesman bound for Cleveland, his briefcase full of carpet samples. Or a Kentish auctioneer. A baker from Spokane. Or at a bar in one of the lounges strike up a conversation with whoever looked loneliest, and not a word from his mouth would have weight, nor would it matter. What mattered was setting a goal, however arbitrary, just at the outer limit of the attainable: the target would buy him a drink, say, or carry his bags to the gate. And how did he calibrate these goals, achieve the maximum available yet avoid the steep penalty for non-attainment he’d laid out for himself years ago? Through a patient estimation of his fellow travelers’ secrets. It was secrets that bound people, he believed. Secrets always ready to hand. So many different secrets, and underneath—by virtue of their secrecy—the scandal of their sameness. This one sex, this one drink, or some other, dreary shame.

And did this sameness still cover everything, in light of his own more recent failure? Arriving at LAX for the next leg of his flight, Amory Gould was beginning to wonder.

As he stepped from the cab to the bright sidewalk outside the concourse, a consternation of passengers, shirttails flapping, boarding passes in hand, was flocked around a service counter. There had to be dozens of them, enough to fill a plane. He gathered, in short order, that there had been further setbacks, in this season of systemic malfunction. A mainframe down yesterday in the Rockies, delaying some connections, knocking out others. A cascade effect through all the nodes. And as he was habitually hours early for checkin, and as this irruption offered by its very difference a species of interest, he resolved to pause here at the edge of the edge, as it were, and to study what had lately puzzled him more than any individual: the psychology of a crowd. Yet when he moved to sit upon a nearby bollard, he found someone else already there, taking in the fray. A short woman of Asian extraction. Her baggage rested near her feet. Her sneakers did not quite touch the ground. And what brought him up short was less this than an intimation of affinity, as if she existed right here with him, outside. Above. Where most people wouldn’t have noticed his approach she glanced over, watchful. Well, of course. From her perspective, it would seem as if he were the one seeking company. He struck a match. Bent to puff at his cigarette. “Quite a show, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” Her alertness now revealed itself as partly exhaustion. “Sure, I guess it is.”

When she declined his offer of a smoke, he returned matches to pack and pack to vest pocket. Had a long, melting drag. And evaluated her again. No, she seemed a promising guinea pig, if he could figure out what she might be made to do. “Business or pleasure?”

She seemed perplexed. “Beg pardon?”

“You’ll indulge me. A little diversion I invented to pass the time, with all the travel I have to do for work. I look at a fellow passenger, and I try to guess: is it business or pleasure that brings him here. Then I find out if I’m right.”

“Oh. I’m just out visiting family for a weekend. I’m not sure it counts as either anymore.”

“Family does tend to take it out of one.”

She looked a little embarrassed. “All of us here were scheduled to fly back to New York yesterday on a DC-10 that as far as I know is still refueling in Wichita. This is the second all-nighter I’ve pulled in a month.”

He puffed again. The tremor of a raw nerve. What could it be? Aside from encounters with maids and at breezeway ice machines, it had been a while since he’d spoken to a flesh-and-blood human. Possibly his reflexes had slowed. But this was why it was good to practice. Anyway, her regrets themselves didn’t matter; it was how they could be turned to account. “As it happens,” he said, “I’m coming from New York myself. Well, came some weeks ago now. Just after the blackout. You must have been in it, too.”

She looked at him.

“See, I knew there was something about you,” he continued. “But I do wonder that someone your age, your whole life ahead, would even bother to go back. In fact, it’s what convinced me to pull up stakes. A whole city, effectively irredeemable.”

“That’s funny, because there was a moment not too long ago when I had this idea the good guys might be returning to take the joint over. A little colony of light …” She caught herself. Though was that still wistfulness in her voice? “Anyway, I don’t have much choice but to go back. I start graduate school at the end of the month. But what about you? On to bigger and better things?”

“Hong Kong,” he said, which was true, if provisional. As this had been provisional, this long layover in a city he detested, holed up in his wretched airport hotel, waiting for the knock that would mean federal agents, and meanwhile working the phone. He’d assumed his new life would wend south, into the shade of the Subcomandante. But it had become widely known that Amory Gould had had a falling-out with his sponsors. The merchant bank to which an old associate had matched his hastily forged résumé was in Asia. Asia, about which he was trying to be optimistic. And perhaps this was more optimism, more striving, but he realized now what he might convince her of, and in so doing prove himself to himself. “I don’t suppose you’ve been?”

“I’ve never been west of Mendocino. Not since I was three.” Her expression had hardened a little. Perhaps he’d been wrong about women after all. She was obviously bright. And was that an announcement, sounding behind this ungovernable mob? He made his tone soft, confiding.

“You know, your bag is already packed, if you would prefer to spend your last weeks of freedom on a real adventure, rather than return so soon to that difficult city.” No turning back now; careful. “There are trans-Pacific flights boarding, even at present …”

“You ever tried to change a ticket on this short a notice?”

“Call it a whim, but perhaps I could help.”

“You’re right, that’s a hell of a whim.” There it was again, wistfulness. Hesitation. The pressure of the withheld.

“Let’s just say I’ve been fortunate in life,” he says. “Fortunate and driven. Nothing makes me happier than helping a young person of similar drive. You could return to school this fall with at least a bit more of the world under your belt. And we’ve lived through something together, you and I. There is a certain confraternity. In any case, it wouldn’t be a gift so much as a loan.”

“I wouldn’t know where to send the repayment. You haven’t even told me your name.”

“Or I’m sure an open return could be arranged. Isn’t an open ticket what people like us are looking for, really?” Beyond the immediate assurance that he was still the man he’d been, he was seeing already a future where in five or ten or fifteen years it would work its way back to him, this favor, through the grid of connections he would throw across the jungles and the plains. He was being forced to reinvent himself—unless of course one was only ever always inventing oneself—and he would need to seed favors in this new quadrant of the world, people who could help him translate his ambitions into actualities. Or what was this all for? Still he was mindful to hold on to his Exigente, the dizzy ember. The edge of the edge of the edge …

“It’s a generous offer, really, mister, for being so fucking impulsive,” she said. She worried a clasp on her carry-on. Then she shrugged. “But we’re just not the same. Even if it might take me a long hard time to know what they are, I’ve still got things to find out back there. So thanks again, but I should go buy a danish, and a magazine. It looks like I might have a while yet to wait.”

And she was gone from the bollard before he could respond, plunging herself into the mass of Manhattoes and tourists all jostling the beleaguered skycap who had no planes under his control. It was as if she’d never really been here. Amory concentrated. Tried to send himself into the skycap. Or past the crowd, into that girl. There may have been something wrong with him after all. Along his arm now he could feel the firm circles under the soft white cloth, the little map they made of his corrections, the freshest not a month old. He would not have thought he’d be adding to it so soon. But Amory Gould was nothing if not hard-nosed, and was already turning slightly away from the crowd, and without looking down beginning to remove the cufflink from his rumpled but still beautiful sleeve. You can get away with anything right out in the open, so long as you don’t look down.

HELL’S KITCHEN—FOREVER

BUT RIGHT NOW it’s still some time before dawn. William Hamilton-Sweeney sits on a futon he can barely see, fondling the Nikkormat the kid left in the kitchen back on Central Park West. It’s been years since he touched a camera, but he knows the button won’t work unless you first push this lever thing. It makes a ratcheting sound when he thumbs it. Snick, goes the shutter. Ratchet. Snick. He probably should have checked to see if he’s wasting actual film, but sometimes when he gets going like this, it’s almost impossible to stop. It’s mostly to distract himself from the fascination of the button, then, that he raises the viewfinder to his eye. The window of the loft has lightened enough since his return that he can pick out the cat perched on the sill, but when he calls her name, she won’t look at him. She’s not his anymore, if she ever was. He pans to the futon’s black cushion, where the letter from his father lies creased into thirds. He has half a mind to take a match to it, but what good would that do? Certain lines are already lodged too deeply in his brain to burn them out without also destroying part of himself. Which he’s discovering he’s loath to do. Snick.

Really, the problem these phrases point to is one of foreshortening. It isn’t that he’s been wrong about what was in his father’s heart, so much as that the universe of his own feelings keeps crowding everyone else’s out. It is a constant struggle to see other people as people, rather than as denizens of a dimension one level below the one in which he’s doomed to wander, imperially alone. That someone close to him might right now be awake in a different part of the city, feeling a pain every bit as real as his own … he can think it, but cannot seem to remember it. And is “remember” even the right word for something for which you have zero empirical evidence? Postulate, maybe. Imagine. He sweeps the lens back toward the window, where the cat hasn’t stirred. Her tail twitches. An idea threatens to form, but doesn’t.

Then there’s a commotion out in the stairwell. Probably some straggling Angel. There were several of them passed out on the landings when he came in, and you could just tell from the liquid squelch beneath the feet and the spiritual reek of their snores that there had been many, many more here in the course of the night, doing what Angels do. But when something starts to rattle the lock on the far side of the pebble-glass, he is suddenly afraid. Light from the skylight frames a huge-headed man. He realizes just as the door swings open that the head is hair—that the man is Mercer—and has only a microsecond to make himself seem normal. And what could be more normal, in New York City, than a person with a camera to his eye? The little focal circle floats over cracked eyeglasses. A black eye. A beard. A split lip. It’s like William’s got the lens backward somehow; he should be the one standing there, beheld and wondered at. Not that he can say this. “Well, it looks like someone had a night to remember.”

There is an impossible pause. Then, as if William isn’t even there, Mercer lumbers toward the window to greet Eartha. Through the viewfinder, the room with all its shadows seems too large to cross, but William is up and crossing it. He can smell Mercer’s sweat, and the spice of … is that pot? He reaches for a shoulder, trying not to feel excited.

“No, really. What happened, Merce?”

Mercer slips out of range of the hand. “You have no right to be here.”

“But I wanted to see you,” William says, which has the virtue of being true. This would be easier if they could see each other’s faces. Easier or harder—one or the other.

“Oh, for once, William, can we please drop the pretense that you have any idea what you want? You go purely on impulse, is what you do. And as soon as you get an impulse to run back out of here, you’ll leave again.” Mercer keeps shifting to the left and the right, trying to get to the door. Finally, he slips free. “I’m going out again. When I come back, I want you gone.”